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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27730984">simple math (there can only be one)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fifteengeese/pseuds/fifteengeese'>fifteengeese</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Umbrella Academy (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>73rd Hunger Games, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, District 12 (Hunger Games), Gen, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Number Five | The Boy has PTSD, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Weapons, ocs are only for plot and such, there will be no oc-pov</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:07:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,563</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27730984</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fifteengeese/pseuds/fifteengeese</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Now for the gentlemen,” Effie fishes around in the glass bowl before she repeats the earlier process of walking back to the podium and smoothing out the paper slip with primly flattened hands. She takes a bit longer this time, it seems. Maybe she likes the suspense.</p>
<p>“Five,” her face screws up slightly at his name, “Hargreeves.”</p>
<p>i re-read the hunger games for this. five whump lovers, come get ya'll juice</p>
<p>tw: PTSD, graphic depictions of violence, death, blood, injury - any chapter-specific triggers will be in the notes!</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Effie Trinket &amp; Number Five | The Boy, Haymitch Abernathy &amp; Effie Trinket, Haymitch Abernathy &amp; Number Five | The Boy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>144</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. we do things a little different here</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Five gets spat out of the time stream and into an unexpected place. Things immediately take a turn for the worse.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Please let me know about any other things I should tw for and any typos/grammatical issues.</p><p>tw: losing time, injury/blood, mentions of guns and knives</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Time is roaring around them, ripping at their clothes and hair and threatening to spit them back out. Five digs his heels in and shoves as hard as he can. It’s like swimming up a waterfall: impossible, grasping at nothing, falling and blindly reaching for a handhold.</p>
<p>Allison’s nails are digging into his hand but doing little to keep her anchored, and the distinct electric-empty feeling of a gap in time is approaching – his hands are burning raw and his eyes are open far too wide and letting far too much light in for being shut. It’s probably the rip in time he caused when he jumped from 1963 to 2019, and it’s still healing. Perfect. He reaches in, crushing down on the vibrating <em>blue</em> that hums inside of him, and uses everything he has to tear open time’s healing wound, forcing his family through. (Five thinks of the Russian Revolution, of the way people were shoved into secret passageways, hoping to get away, and he thinks of the cold edge of a suppressor against an aristocratic skull).</p>
<p>The <em>blue</em> snaps and there’s too much air in his chest, expanding too much and his lungs are bruising against his rib cage. It feels less like slipping or standing and more like whatever was anchoring him has been cut. He’s never been inside of the time stream for so long, he thinks, rather idly, as the movement slows around him. Five wants to pull on time again, but when he reaches for it, hands jammed into fists and eyes snapping open at the realization that his family is alone, without him, there is no response. It doesn’t even hurt like it did when he over trained as a child; no vomiting or crumpling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.</p>
<p>Just silence.</p>
<p>His blood rushes in his ears as time swirls around him, the tear in front of him closing far faster than it should. (In what, all three of his experiences?) The pounding in his head is irritating, although it’s not like he hasn’t dealt with that for the last 45 years of his life. Five is suddenly aware that there is no air in the time stream – does he need to breathe here? Is that a concern? Time picks up speed around him, like he’s caught up in a faster current. <em>Of course it’s nonlinear.</em></p>
<p>He squints at the tear again, fog in his eyes and his mind. Time roars in his ears. The tear shrivels.</p>
<p>The tear isn't shrinking. The tear is getting farther away.</p>
<p>It blinks out of existence.</p>
<p>
  <em>Shit.</em>
</p>
<p>Five is hurtling along, time isn’t just moving fast, it’s like being shot down the barrel of a gun, like being transported by a briefcase, ripping straight through the layers of time and space rather than navigating them, brute force instead of out-maneuvering. There is no resistance, not like when he had tried to move within the stream of time, even with a briefcase. There is nothing to stop him, nothing to even slow him down, so when he sees another tear in time forming directly ahead of him, he tucks his legs and arms in and makes himself as small as possible. <em>Just like jumping out of a moving car; just another training exercise.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is like jumping out of a moving car, but it turns out that had been worse than he remembered. Fuck.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>He hits the ground on his back and every last bit of air flies out of his lungs, a fish out of water being bludgeoned to death with a river rock. Five keeps his arms and legs tucked to his chest and eyes squeezed shut until he feels himself roll to a stop, and once the world stops spinning a bit, he looks around to take stock of the situation.</p>
<p>There’s a coarse, gritty slurry on his clothes and hair from his tumble across the ground. The ground is cold, and it seems to be midday, maybe a bit past. Sunlight reflects in the wetness of the slurry, blurry and ringing in his vision. Hardpacked dirt, the street, is muddy and black with grit. There is a crowd of people dressed in homespun clothes, crushing in on each other. Five squints against the glare of the street and stumbles up.</p>
<p>A hand claps down on his shoulder and he spins, reaching for blue, and nearly pitches into the crowd beside him when nothing comes. The man in front of him grabs his arm this time and yanks him upright. The hard metal of a gun jams into his side, white gloved hands clutching at him.</p>
<p>“You need to sign your name, kid.”</p>
<p>The man starts moving him toward the table and Five jolts, reaching for his power, but nothing happens. His ears start to ring when he pushes harder. He can barely hear over the incessant noise as the man sits down behind a card table, handing him a pen.</p>
<p>Five blinks. He takes the pen. His skin is starting to itch. He needs to get out of here, there are too many people and there’s nowhere to hide in what he now realizes is the town square. But he can’t get out, and he has no gun or knife or powers. He’s a weapon, he can kill with his bare hands if he has to, but the world is still tipping on its axis and it feels like a grenade went off next to his head. It’s a wonder he survived the first few days of the apocalypse like this. At least there are people this time.</p>
<p>The man in white looks at him, waving his hand toward the basket of blank paper slips in the middle of the table. “Hurry up – you’re the last one here, and we need to start the ceremony soon. How many slips do you need?”</p>
<p>He tries to go for the “helpless child” strategy. “I’m not sure?” Five smiles in a way that Diego would tell him is “disturbing” and “predatory,” but the way he’s swaying a bit and his squint against the light and sound must balance it out, since the man doesn’t shrink back.</p>
<p>“Well, if you don’t know, this is definitely your first time coming to the Reaping. You just need to sign once and put the slip in the boy’s bowl over there.”</p>
<p>Five considers not signing his real name, but this is clearly an alternate time and place, if not an alternate timeline, so he compromises. First real name, and the last name he would’ve had if there were legal institutions at the time he was old enough to change his name so it wasn’t just “Number Five.” <em>Five Hargreeves</em>. He drops the slip into a fluted glass bowl.</p>
<p>A woman in the same white uniform, holding some kind of gun that Five doesn’t recognize <em>(definitely an alternate timeline, then)</em> unclips the barrier surrounding a crowd of boys. She waves him in and clips the barrier shut behind him.</p>
<p>The boys around him are refusing to look at each other except in wide-eyed and fleeting glances. Their feet scuff at the dirt. They are just as terrible as his siblings had been at concealing fear – they’d never learned how to cover that up, especially Klaus, Ben, and Vanya. Five looks back at the bowls with the paper slips, at the cordoned off areas that he now sees are separating children of different heights – different ages. The man in white called it ceremony – why are there people with weapons herding children into groups? It could be some kind of sacrifice, but there is clearly modern technology and most modern societies don’t participate in those rituals, even if this is an alternate time and place. But this is an alternate timeline, a completely different universe.</p>
<p>The blurriness of the sound and light around him snap into focus as he realizes he knows nothing about the world around him. A man at the front of the crowd begins to speak, and Five latches onto the only discreet source of information around him – the man’s speech.</p>
<p>It is long, verbose, and clearly pre-written. The eyes of the children around him have glazed over. This is a regular event, then.</p>
<p>Bullet points fill his mind – a little more slippery than following equations, but not impossible.</p>
<p>A war for survival in North America, possibly brought on by climate change, judging by the list of natural disasters (at least he’s on the same continent, so traveling back to his timeline won’t be straining to the point where he might be ripped apart in the time stream). The country that came out of the war is called Panem and has thirteen districts, along with a capital, apparently called “Capitol.” Some of the districts – or all? – rise against the capital, and 12 are defeated. The thirteenth is razed to the ground. The peace treaty tightens restrictions, forcing peace, and brings about a literal sacrifice as a punishment to the districts.</p>
<p>
  <em>Apparently human sacrifice made a comeback, then.</em>
</p>
<p>The man finishes his speech and begins to list the victors. He begins and then finishes the list immediately, since there is only one name on it: Haymitch Abernathy.</p>
<p>Another man, presumably Haymitch, staggers across the stage and sits down hard in a chair to the left of the speech man’s podium. The chair rocks dangerously and the woman on stage, also sitting in a chair and wearing a ridiculous wig, grimaces.</p>
<p>Haymitch promptly vomits onto the stage floor, leans too far forward in his chair, and tips forward into his own sick. Everyone in the crowd winces. The man giving the speech looks practically sunburnt in his embarrassment, but motions the wig-woman to the podium. She steps gingerly around Haymitch, who is at this point completely passed out and laying in his own vomit.</p>
<p>Once she’s at the podium, the woman smiles so brightly that it gives Five a headache. Her smile feels like a fluorescent interrogation lamp.  “I’m Effie Trinket, as I’m sure you all know, since I have to run this district’s reaping every year.”</p>
<p>Five doesn’t miss the tension around her eyes – she definitely wishes she had somewhere better to be.</p>
<p>“Thank you so much to everyone for coming, I’m so honored to be here to conduct the reaping. Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor!” There’s a pause as she moves to the two glass bowls full of paper slips, which have been moved to a table at the center of the stage.</p>
<p>“Ladies first, as always!” She reaches into the bowl, still grinning, refusing to look away from the camera crews that hover around the edges of the crowds like vultures.  Effie crosses the stage to stand behind the podium. She smooths the paper slip, pinching her lips together. The crinkle of the paper is shatteringly loud against the complete silence in the town square.</p>
<p>“Toluene Yarmet,” and she says it like a question.</p>
<p>One of the people in those white uniforms unclips a the barrier of the youngest girls’ section. Toluene Yarmet, tiny, skinny, long dark hair, bangs hanging over her eyes, makes her way to the stage. An image of Vanya approaching Reginald flits briefly across his mind.</p>
<p>Toluene makes her way up the steps, foot nearly catching on a stair and sending her tumbling. She barely catches herself in time, visibly shaking even from where Five is at the back of the crowd. Effie smiles and clamps a carefully manicured hand on the girl’s shoulder. Effie laughs like she expects applause.</p>
<p>The crowd is silent. <em>At least sacrificing children isn’t completely condoned.</em></p>
<p>Effie’s smile falters. “Any volunteers?”</p>
<p>There is barely a second of silence before she moves on.</p>
<p>“Now for the gentlemen,” Effie beams, leaving Toluene to stand by herself on the right half of the stage, still shaking. Effie fishes around in the glass bowl before she returns to the podium and smooths out the paper slip with primly flattened hands. She takes a bit longer this time, it seems. Maybe she likes the suspense.</p>
<p>“Five,” her face screws up slightly at his name, “Hargreeves.”</p>
<p>With the way Toluene is acting up on that stage, Five is sure he should be scared. He does his best, keeps his eyes to the ground, envisions Effie as the Handler, the man behind the podium as Reginald. Thinks of special training and feels his brows draw down of their own accord, remembers the fight in the department store with Hazel and Cha-Cha and the way he and Dolores huddled behind the counter. It’s not quite right, he ends up looking more closed off than terrified, but it’s better than nothing. It's better than bitter confidence.</p>
<p>He tucks his hands into the pockets of his blazer and shuffles through the boys that are packed around him. The man from earlier, the one who had told him to sign his name, unclips the barrier. The sunlight reflecting off the man’s helmet makes it hard to see, but he’s pretty sure he is avoiding eye contact.</p>
<p>Five hears a few people gasp as he walks to the stage, although he’s not sure why – this is a regular practice.</p>
<p>Effie guides him to stand next to Toluene, who looks to be on the brink of tears. Five is silently grateful that years of training with Reginald and in the commission have made his poker face nearly bulletproof.</p>
<p>After Effie reintroduces him, the man who was giving the speech – whom Five now knows as the mayor – says a few words about the previously mentioned treaty. A song begins to play over the square’s rusted sound system, presumably an anthem of sorts, with how straight the uniforms are standing. Effie motions for him to shake hands with Toluene.</p>
<p>Her hand is small and frail and when he looks at her face it is much sharper than Vanya’s was as a child, soft angles cut away by the harshness of malnutrition. She looks into his eyes with a kind of steely determination. Five holds her gaze, and the anthem ends.</p>
<p>More people in white uniforms swarm the stage and surround him and Toluene. They march them off the stage and toward a squat, grey building. The uniforms guide them to separate rooms and leave Five to sit on a velvet couch, although one of them stays behind, an armored shadow outside the frosted glass of the room’s hardwood door.</p>
<p>An hour passes. His mind wanders, bouncing off of various equations. Might as well get an early start on the math he’ll need to get back to his family, although it would’ve been a bit easier if he’d had Vanya’s book to write in. The book makes him think of the little girl, of Vanya’s face on the cover of the book.</p>
<p>
  <em>You’re going to have to kill her.</em>
</p>
<p>The quiet of the room does little to soothe the growing ache that has dug its way into his skull.</p>
<p>The uniformed man shuffles outside the door and unlocks it, flicking open his visor. “No one’s coming to see you off, kid?”</p>
<p><em>That’s what this hour’s for, then</em>.</p>
<p>“No.” There’s no one to come in the first place, but uniform doesn’t need to know that.</p>
<p>Uniform shuffles again. “Oh. Well, it’s time to go. Bring all of your things with you – you can just use something off them as your token, since no one brought you one.”</p>
<p>Five follows him out of the building and down the steps to a car.</p>
<p>Five blinks and they are standing in front of a train platform. There is no tell-tale receding blue around his fists. Sunlight and the whoosh of the train door are like hammer blows to his skull. The sunlight flashes brightly in front of him – a camera then, not the sun. Rain slicks the platform below him, camera flashes ricocheting off of it.</p>
<p>A few uniforms block the cameras. They push him inside the train car. The door spits air as it closes behind him.</p>
<p>Effie appears in front of him, candy smile plastered to her face. “If you’ll come with me, I can show you your rooms. You don’t need to worry about clothes or anything like that, there’s already things for you to wear, so we can get you out of that dirty set.”</p>
<p>Reginald would’ve approved of the room – it was extravagant - but that doesn’t stop it from feeling like a motel room where he’d find a tube and a new kill order. Nothing’s really different, he just has 23 different targets to choose from this time. Twenty-three targets that are all children.</p>
<p>“Be in the dining car for dinner in an hour, dear,” and Effie leaves him.</p>
<p>Five showers the grit – dried coal-dust slurry, his mind helpfully supplies – off and confronts the shrapnel wound in his side. His hands shake as he peels the soaked gauze and cotton off. <em>Fuck.</em> The stitches are torn, probably from getting thrown on the ground by a pissed-off time portal.</p>
<p>He snatches the sewing kit off the desk and rifles through the bathroom cabinets for more gauze and cotton. It’s a train for transporting kids that will fight each other to the death – there’s got to be first-aid supplies. Unsurprisingly, there is an entire first-aid kid. <em>Can’t have your human sacrifices dying before they can kill each other. </em></p>
<p>The stitching is a bit rough. His hands shake, likely some kind of post-time-travel effect. Unexpected shakes jerk the thread a few times, so he slows down. Ripping a chunk of skin off before he has to fight for his life seems like a significant disadvantage. Five dresses the wound – infection would also be particularly bad – and pads it with cotton and gauze. A black shirt and black pants will hide any residual bleeding.</p>
<p>Five takes a deep breath through his nose, mouth tight. Time for dinner.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>i know it's classic but yes i am begging for comments or kudos or any kind of feedback/thoughts/literally anything. i have very little time to write so i'd love to know how this went for you!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. heading back to the start</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Five finds a token, eats food, and gets a glimpse of what is ahead.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I’m so sorry that this is late, my computer deleted all my work during a power outage, and something’s wrong with my word files or smth??? rip</p><p>Fun fact: Toluene is named after a byproduct of coal processing!</p><p>tw: mentions of vomit and nausea, mention of alcohol / Please let me know about any other things I should tw for and any typos/grammatical issues.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Five moves to blink past the door, and is sorely reminded of his frazzled powers when he doesn’t even feel the usual resistance around his hands. He just sighs and slides open the door.</p><p>The glossy panels of the hallway ripple with distorted, watery sunlight from the windows. It is quiet, except for the rattle of the cars and the muted sound of air rolling past the train. Images of his siblings flash through his mind. They’re fresher now than they were in the apocalypse - seeing their faces had helped jog his memory, prevented them from blurring into all of the ash and dust. But he’s alone again, nothing but memories for company, no one to talk to, no one to bring him a token.</p><p>After a few seconds, in which no time and hours seem to pass, he turns back to the room. His blazer is on the bathroom counter. He pulls the first aid kit back out and finds the scissors - thankfully they’re sharp enough to cut through the thick, if slightly scratchy, material of the blazer. The academy patch rests on a jagged piece of fabric, and he shoves the whole thing in his pocket. He leaves the blazer on the bathroom floor, hole in the left side of its chest.</p><p>Five shuffles back out of the door, which he’d left open. <em> Rather stupidly, </em> his mind informs him. <em> Watch the doors and corners. Don’t expose your back. </em></p><p>Effie is in the hallway, approaching the door, mouth twisted and sour. She smiles and claps her hands together when she sees him. “Good, you’re ready. And on time! Dinner is being served in the dining car, come along!”</p><p>Her smile doesn’t fall when she turns - Five checks - which is reassuring, at the very least. People with two faces are so much more dangerous when one of those faces is a smile.</p><p>The click of her heels is muffled by a long, plush carpet in the hallway. Five is grateful. </p><p>The dining car is very similar to the hallway - paneled walls, heavily varnished and glossy. A long window illuminates the room with rain-filtered sunlight, as does an expensive chandelier that sways gently as the train moves. The light from the window clearly shows the nicks and cuts through the thick varnish of some of the panels. There had definitely been a fight or two in this train car.</p><p>Haymitch is sitting with his back to the window, slumped over a plate of stew, although his focus seems to be mostly on the drink cart across the room. Altogether, it’s impressive he’s upright after his fiasco at the ceremony - Reaping, Five reminds himself. </p><p>Toluene sits across from Haymitch. She is frantically spooning stew into her mouth. <em> Malnutrition. </em> She’s wearing a powder blue dress, brown leather shoes, and her hair is braided into two long plaits down her back. They are tied together in the middle with a ribbon, like a horseshoe, meant to hold luck. Her feet don’t even touch the ground when she sits all the way back into her chair, and he is going to have to kill her, and Five almost wishes his stomach would turn at the thought. He grits his teeth when it doesn’t.</p><p>Effie sits down next to Haymitch. The light from the window emblazons a halo around the pale pink wig piled on her head. She gestures to the seat next to Toluene, who is still shoveling stew into her mouth, and Five stalks across the carpet. His hand nearly crushes the patch in his pocket, but the thickness of the embroidery stops him.</p><p>Sitting in a chair, eating rich plum and lamb stew, fresh green salads, mashed potatoes, steaming rice, dish after dish arriving in the car. It’s jarring, and it’s all too familiar. Five sits straight and eats slowly - eating too quickly after years of nothing but dandelion greens and canned soup would just end with him hunched over his own sick.</p><p>Toluene eats as fast as she can, hands nearly shaking with her eagerness to get the next course into her mouth. She begins to look nauseated by the time they’ve gotten through the panna cotta, blinking slowly, mouth pulled in, breathing as deep as she can without Effie commenting. Her skin is too dark for him to tell if she’s paling like Klaus did when they were kids and he’d drank too much, but he doesn’t need to see that to know she’s made a mistake. A mistake she only could’ve made if she’d never had the opportunity to make it before.</p><p>The silence is stifling and broken only by the clinking of Effie’s silverware against the swooping glass dishes that dessert had been served in. Effie dabs at her mouth with a cloth napkin. Haymitch rolls his eyes.</p><p>“Now that we’ve finished our dinner, although some in a more civilized fashion than others, it’s time for us to watch the rest of the Reapings! You’ll get to meet your fellow competitors, isn’t that exciting?”</p><p>
  <em> Perhaps not exciting, but certainly informative. </em>
</p><p>She leads them into a separate compartment. The footage is cut down to a couple shots of a crowd in another town square, and then more people with brightly colored hair and clothes drawing names out of identical glass bowls. </p><p>Districts 1, 2, and 4 all have tributes who are strong and healthy-looking, and most likely at the very upper limit of the age range - eighteen. The tributes from district 3 are young and relatively thin. District 5’s tributes are slightly older, but otherwise not particularly distinct. District 6 is an odd pair of a young girl - almost as young as Toluene - and a boy who is probably at the upper age limit. The tributes from Districts 7, 9, and 10 are all in the middle of the age range and relatively physically fit. District 8 is another odd pair like that of 6, and District 11 is two tributes who are probably 18, but are nowhere near as healthy as those from 1, 2, and 4.</p><p>District 12 is last. The cameras capture everything. Haymitch pukes and tips over, and Effie draws names. Toluene looks small and frail, eyes glassy, shoulders set like she’s bracing against a non-existent wind. There is an audible murmur from the crowd when Five sees himself emerge from the boy’s section. It’s hard not to notice that he also looks shockingly young, especially in comparison to his old body. <em> So that’s what the gasp was about - two of the youngest possible tributes. </em></p><p>The replay ends, and Effie sniffs, “You both did very well at leaving your images to be molded by the stylists - you didn’t give much to the cameras to play with, so we’ll have a lot of wiggle room with making you up and giving you the best personas possible.”</p><p>Haymitch snores, head tipped over the back of the couch he’s sitting on.</p><p>“Although it would be nice to have someone actually capable of mentoring you two, since I can’t very well advise you on how to win the games like he can.”</p><p>Silence stretches out after Effie’s comment, and eventually she gives up on waiting for a reply and leaves the room.</p><p>Toluene waits until the muffled clicks of Effie’s heels have faded out before speaking. “You’re not from District 12, are you? Or at least you’re not from the Seam. Your clothes were too nice.”</p><p>Five hasn’t spoken more than five words in the time he’s been here, and he’s not spoken to a child since he was one. Formulating a response is more challenging than he’d like to admit, especially since halfway through, he realizes he doesn’t look like he used to, and therefore cannot invoke the “I am an adult, I have credibility,” part of his response.</p><p>He sighs and settles for, “Kind of. I’m from somewhere like the Seam.” He swallows. “There’s not a lot of food.” It comes out more disjointed than he would like, but he gives himself a little credit for avoiding any swear words or threats of violence.</p><p>“Goodnight.” He needs to get out of here before it becomes even more evident that he is incapable of holding a conversation with anyone that isn’t his siblings, Delores, or someone trying to kill him. Although, this girl does fall into that last category, or at least she will, eventually.</p><p>He shuffles back to his room and crawls into bed after brushing his teeth (something he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed). It’s hard to sleep, but it’s been that way for a very long time. He avoids thinking of his siblings, and instead thinks of the other tributes.</p><p>Five knows not to discard any of these people as <em> not-a-threat; </em> appearances can tell you everything or nothing, but assuming either of those is asking for the other to be true. Still, several tributes stick in his mind as the most immediately threatening.</p><p>The District 4 girl is solid and bitter-faced, and the rest from 1, 2, and 4 are all excited and proud, as well as strong enough to be a threat to Five in the form he is in now. District 7’s tributes seem to know each other and make direct eye contact with the camera. </p><p>It hits him as he’s drifting off that he probably should’ve stayed in the screening room and asked Toluene about the other districts. Lack of preparation always was a killer.</p>
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